As part of my new ‘kachirho’ company setup, I’ve purchased a new laptop – DELL XPS15 9550… It’s a beast with new SkyLake i7 6700 processor – and 16GB RAM – and 512 SSD – see here for a YouTube review. And it looks super-sexy with carbon finish…

It’s got the new (almost 4K) UHD resolution – 3840×2160 – and touch screen. The visuals on this resolution are amazing – BUT – the clincher is that you need to ‘up’ the font size scaling.

By default, it was set to 200% – if setting to 100% – it’s hard to read !

The next dilemma – and discussion with a colleague – was the scenario for a HYPER-V VM. I have one for some local development and working with K2.

Yes, I could use an Azure VM – but I have a local VM – so there…

While I can run a VM at decent speed, and with 10GB RAM, it’s not something that I can run on ‘multiple monitors’.

The next consideration, was to drop my screen resolution to 1920×1080 – to match the second external monitor. This WORKED – to a degree.

The VM would now pick up the base screen resolution (3840×1920) – within the VM – regardless of the desktop resolution I’d just changed to.

It turns out that HyperV must grab the base screen resolution – at BOOT time.

So – the answer was :

Change down from scale at 200% to 100% (I use 175% a lot of the time)

Drop the laptop screen resolution to 1920×1080

Reboot

Start up the VM

Connect – and tick the box for ‘span multiple monitors’

I can now run my VM across both screens – and both at 1920×1080.

It’s a fiddly way to do it – but luckily it’s so quick to re-boot, it doesn’t matter !

For a recent SP2010 to SP2013 upgrade, we have a SharePoint Publishing page that has some SandBoxed Solution webparts. We need to REMOVE these webparts – as we’re going with a different approach – some JavaScript/CSOM – to do the same function.

Anyway, I’ve defined a script that will get a SP page, and remove ALL webparts.

This is via PowerShell + CSOM, so the same approach would would work for SP2013, or O365 (just need a different ClientContext – and login/connection).

Last weekend, I presented a session at the Office 365 Saturday held in Melbourne. I didn’t get there until lunch was being served, as I was coaching my son’s basketball team – but there was a great buzz & lots of chatter when I got there !

My session was entitled “VS, PS, CS, JS and no BS”.

If you don’t know the acronyms, it was a session about :

VS = Visual Studio 2015

PS = PowerShell

CS = C#

JS = JavaScript

BS = well, there was none, right !?

🙂

Using Visual Studio 2015 as my IDE, I covered three main areas, with corresponding demos.

Provision a Site Collection – using PowerShell

Connect to SPO

Create a new Site Collection

Regional Settings

Activate features

Upload files

Create lists & pages

Set Alt Css Url

Welcome page

Add JavaScript reference (JS injection)

This last point was a topic that I’ll cover in detail in another post – a way to get some good functionality into your SharePoint O365 site, without needing to change the Master Page – otherwise known by some work colleagues as ‘dentistry via the belly button’ – LOL !

Provider hosted app in Azure – using C#

Using CSOM, users can provision a sub-site (SPWeb), and have it configured with a variety of features and layout. My code even provisions a Yammer group if required.

Activate features

Add lists

Create webparts

Set security

Create Yammer group

Add Yammer webpart to page

Add blog site

Add audience targetted content editor webparts

Additional functionality – using JavaScript

Lastly, I showed some of the functions we developed using CSOM and the JSOM :

Add footer – without Master Page update (JavaScript injection)

Waffle

Show dialog

Delete sub-sites

Get AppTiles

Much of the demo’s were fairly fast paced, and “you had to be there to see it” – but I’ve loaded the slides for your viewing – and will blog some of the items above in depth.

Let me know if you would like to see/hear more – and thanks for attending my session – if you were there on the day. (no BS, was there ?? right !!?!?)

After running this PowerShell, the field is SET when viewing the column via REST :

And now, when users create a page – regardless of PAGE LAYOUT – this value will be ticked to OFF by default – and standard URL’s will be used – too easy.

The main issue we had was with a Content Search WebPart that was NOT showing the pages that had the checkbox ON. We needed users to make sure to set it off – making it DEFAULT to off was the best option.